Proudly Feminist, Proudly Bisexual, Proudly Atheist.

Yemisi Ilesanmi is a Nigerian woman, resident in UK. She holds a Masters of Law (LL.M) degree in Gender, Sexuality and Human Rights. She is a trade unionist, human rights activist, an author, a poet and sometimes moonlights as a plus size model.

She is a passionate campaigner for equal rights, social justice and poverty alleviation. Her debut book 'Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is Not Un-African' is available in paperback and kindle editions on Amazon (www.amazon.com/dp/1481864815).

In sometimes, what she thinks as a past life, she was-
- National Women leader/Assistant National Secretary, Nigeria Labour Party.
- Vice President, International Trade Union Congress
- Chairperson, ITUC Youth Committee
- International Labour Conference (ILC) Committee Member on Applications of Standards
- Founder/President, National Association of Nigerian Female Students

She is the founder and coordinator of the campaign group Nigerian LGBTIs in Diaspora Against Anti-Same Sex Laws.

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Order your sizzling copy of : Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is Not Un-African! Available in Paperback and kindle editions on Amazon.

This review is from: Freedom To Love For All: Homosexuality is not Un-African, (Paperback) Ms.Yemisi Ilesanmi manages to put together a brilliant piece of artwork full of eloquence, deep analytical skills and detailed references.This book breaks down stereotypes, single stories and farces by confronting hypocrisy, bigotry and ignorance with dignity, enlightenment and love. The reader becomes educated, motivated, outraged and empowered. By far one of the best books that covers LGBT rights in Africa, with an African voice. Highly recommended to students and scholars interested in gender studies, queer studies, African studies or Human Rights in general. Also very accessible to general public, in particular to persons committed to social change and the fight against discrimination in all its forms. - Miguel Obradors

“Senate President David Mark has said the decision of the National Assembly to ban same-sex marriage in the country was irreversible. Mark, according to a statement, said this at a dinner hosted in his honour by the Nigerian Community in Prague, Czech Republic, yesterday.”

‘The Senate president explained that the bill, which has been approved by both chambers of the National Assembly, would not in any way infringe on the rights of Nigerians.’

He said: “The law against same-sex marriage is an approval of the wishes of the generality of Nigerians who are desirous of living within our cultural bounds. “The law is not designed to infringe on the human rights of Nigerians in any way.

Hmm.. he probably does not consider Nigerian Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Trans as Nigerians or even Humans.

“Also, wherever you go in our country today, our people are completely in support of the National Assembly because the practice of same-sex, as you all know, is alien to us.”

I wonder if the famed orgies with his wives and mistresses are not alien to Africa.

“Senate President, Senator David Mark, declaring open the public hearing on same sex marriage bill, said:

“It is offensive. It is repugnant. I will preach against it and we must stand up to reject same sex marriages in Nigeria. I do not think any religion support this. My faith as Christian abhors it. It is incomprehensible to contemplate on same sex marriage. I cannot understand it. I cannot be a party to it.”

Dear Senate President, is the Bible the new constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria? The Senate president should understand that he was not elected (or selected as the case may be) to preach his religion to Nigerians. His duty is to make democratic laws and uphold the constitution; not to uphold his religion or impose biblical laws on Nigerians.

I don’t do faith, I do logic. People are entitled to their faith (if they have one) but they are not entitled to impose their faith on any aspects of my life including my sexuality. We are bound together as Nigerian citizens, not by faith but by laws, rules and regulations. We have a system of democracy which we keep developing to protect each and everyone’s human rights. Believers have no business waving their faith or religion at others, it is as irritating as waving your private parts in public.

“In a statement signed by the chief press secretary to the senate president, Paul Mumeh, Mr Mark noted that besides banning same sex marriage, it is now a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment of not less than 14 years. The senate president said that in spite of pressures from some quarters, the law has come to stay. He further said the government has to prove to the rest of the world, who are advocates of same sex marriage that Nigerians promote and respect sanity, morality and humanity.”

Wait a minute, Nigerians promote and respect sanity, morality and humanity? This is news to me! All these stories of corruption in high places, pedophilia in the senate, Boko Haram, jungle justice and setting alight human beings like they did the Aluu4, must be tales by moonlight. Really, how could Senator David Mark use the words sanity, morality and humanity in the same sentence to describe Nigerians and still keep a straight face? (Excerpts from my book Freedom To Love for ALL: Homosexuality is not Un-African.)

This ignoramus Senator once famously said telephone is not for the poor. He also said there should be a restriction on the use of social media because people us it to insult their leaders. What a nincompoop!

Truly seeing the ignorant face of this bigoted, ignoramus Nigerian Senate President brings out an unhealthy violent streak in me, I just want to slap, nay, PUNCH some sense into him. I wouldn’t bother to have a rational discussion with him because Logic would be lost on him anyway, he is too far gone living in his own stinky asshole. However someone already did a good job of pointing out just what an ignoramus this David Mark is. Enjoy his take and yeah, weep for Nigeria if you still have any tear left for that country of hypocrites.

How To Properly Insult David Mark By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

Posted: July 31, 2012 – 02:20

Columnist:

Correct Me If I Am Right By Rudolf Okonkwo

“We need to change our attitude on how we report things about our country and we should emulate the foreign reporters who never report negative things about their countries.” David Mark, Nigeria’s Senate President, complaining about social media being used to insult Nigerian leaders in a speech to reporters covering the Nigerian Senate.

I’m going to use some bad words in this column. If you cannot stomach them, please stop reading.

Right now.

Thank you.

I do not waste my thoughts on some Nigerian politicians. Despite their antics and cries for attention, I dismiss this bunch of political actors. Some are so rotten that I consider them irredeemable. Some are so insignificant in the overall reformation scheme that I feel they will wither away as soon as the cord of corruption is cut off. Some are nothing but stagnant balls of smoke made of sheer ignorance. Mr. David Mark was one of them. But he shouldn’t be.

On a second thought, David Mark is much more than all of the above. He is not just irredeemable. He is also contaminating. He is not just insignificant. His dirty fingers are scratching the canvas of Nigeria. He is not just a stagnant smoke of ignorance on Nigeria’s sky. He is also in motion.

In short, David Mark is a lucky bastard. And nothing is scarier than a government of lucky bastards in the life of a nation.

Mr. Mark went in front of reporters that cover the senate, men and women that he has pocketed, to complain that the social media is used by faceless people to insult Nigerian leaders like him. He grumbled that these disgruntled operators of social media have no way of retracting their stories. His solution: that the government should control social media to stop its users from insulting leaders like him.

What the likes of David Mark do not know is that social media does not operate in a vacuum. It needs content to exist. And social media content is provided by people like David Mark.

Social media thrives on the idiosyncrasies, excesses and stupidity of politicians and celebrities. Those in the limelight who do not wish to be in the spotlight of social media should retire to their villages and wait for death. For instance, nobody in social media is losing sleep over Arthur Nzeribe, who is currently at his Oguta home awaiting death. David Mark can do the same in one of his homes in Benue, Ghana, Caribbean, the US, Belize, the UK, Ireland etc.

For those unfamiliar with the pedigree of the senate president, here is it in brief. David Mark is a leader in that class of miseducated men and women who rode the wave of unaccountable leadership, looting and ruining Nigeria until the nation became a failure. These are the men and women who failed Nigeria with such a staged craftsmanship that the nation they failed works perfectly well for them. If Nigeria were a tree, these men and women cut the tree and told it where to fall.

For those who need more details, this is the essential biography of David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark. Born on April 18, 1948, in Otukpo, he joined the Nigerian army and became prominent as a Major when he was named Secretary of the Abandoned Property Implementation Commission after the Biafra-Nigeria Civil War. In the 1980s, he reemerged as one of the so-called Babangida boys. He became the military governor of Niger state from 1984- 1986. When Babangida took over as Nigeria’s military dictator, he brought Mark close as his Minister of Communication. He played a prominent role in the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. He headed the gang that threatened to kill M.K.O. Abiola if the military had dared to hand power over to him. He fell out with Gen. Sani Abacha who retired him from the army and he went on exile. At the beginning of this current democratic dispensation in 1999, he became a senator representing Benue South senatorial zone. He supported Obasanjo’s effort to amend the Nigerian constitution to serve a third term. For that effort he collected the lion share of the billions that Obasanjo’s supporters used to bribe senators. He became the Senate president in 2007 as a reward for his loyalty to the PDP.

David Mark is a lucky bastard. Not even one of the 400,000 people of his other country, Belize, will nominate him to be a janitor for their senate.

Even though he believes that a sergeant in the army is better than a university graduate, nobody knows if Mr. Mark can write his name. But we know that he can open offshore accounts in New Jersey and the Cayman islands. We know that is the place he hid most of the Gulf oil windfall for himself and his boss, Babangida. We know that is where he hid proceeds from NITEL deals he cooked up as Minister of Communication when he famously said that poor people had no need for phones and as such he siphoned the money allocated to his ministry. We know that he spent about 6 million British pounds sterling to purchase significant interest in the 18-hole St Margaret’s Golf Club in Ireland. We know he owns a 2.5 million British pounds sterling home on Thames River in London. We know he has millions and millions of pounds sterling in trust for his numerous children and wives all over Europe and America. We know this because his nasty divorce from wife number five, Victoria Preye, exposed some of his hidden investments.

Despite his enormous stolen wealth, here is what David Mark’s epitaph will say. “Here lies a man who admired the trappings of Western civilization but was ignorant of its tenets.” It is the same epitaph for Idi Amin, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida and Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga.

On top of David Mark’s head roves a giant question mark. When he opens his mouth remarkable gaffes gush out. It is a mark of complete genuflection of a nation that such a scion of corruption is at the head of the upper house of the people’s assembly. His bland mind marketed as diplomatic is impervious of his environment. Otherwise he would have noticed from his hospital bed that it was Israeli media that kept the heat on until former Israeli President Moshe Katsav was sentenced to seven-years for rape.

David Mark is a shameless hypocrite who has absolute disdain for Nigeria. That such an uninspiring character is angling for the presidency of Nigeria is a testament to the hopelessness of the Nigerian project. Put aside his pedigree, Nigeria’s number three man is as shallow as they come. Otherwise he would have heard that it was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post newspaper that singlehandedly exposed President Richard Nixon as a crook and forced him to resign.

David Mark is old enough to know that “the only countries where newspapers are full of good news are those countries where the prisons are full of good people.” If David Mark is just ignorant, I won’t be scared. I will simply hope that soon, like other ignoramuses like him ruining Nigeria, he will die off with his stupidity and leave Nigeria to its fate. But David Mark is much more than ignorant. He is deliberately manipulative and mischievous. And that is dangerous.

David Mark is a lucky bastard. If an American newspaper places its searchlight on him for just 24 hours, as soon as the report comes out, Interpol, FBI, Scotland Yard, KGB, SSS, MSS, BNI, ICPC, EFCC etc will all be fighting over whose handcuffs will be on David Mark’s hands, legs, waist and ankles.

Mr. Mark hates a marketplace of ideas because he has no confidence in his own opinion. So he dislikes any media that challenges his opinion and tries to hold him accountable. He has been so used to being worshipped that any deviation from that is considered demeaning and insulting. For Mark and his likes, not appending to their names their fake doctorate degrees or their worthless grand commander of a corrupt and crumbling federal republic is already an insult in and of itself. But Mark is perfectly retaining his right to insult Nigerians, disrespect them and treat them as imbeciles who have no idea what one plus one is.

This is why David Mark does not like the social media. He cannot buy them over. He cannot pay them retainership to publish only favorable stories about him. He cannot get them to submit drafts of their stories to his office for approval before publication.

He cannot fly them to an expensive resort hotel and give them lectures on how to do their job as the Fourth Estate. He is mad because he cannot stop social media from writing what one of his six wives said in anger.

Mr. Mark loves the compromised media that does not ask him what he does for Nigeria for which he gets paid over N600 million a year. He loves the compromised media that will quote him as saying, “I will defend Nigeria’s unity with the last drop of my blood,” but won’t ask him why he renounced Nigeria’s citizenship to become a citizen of Belize when his investment in that country was threatened. He loves the compromised media that will not ask why he loves Nigeria so much but will rather go to Israel for a minor medical treatment.

Thank you Rufdolf Ogoo–Okonkwo for the well said piece, but we can’t ignore the ignoramus because his manipulative ways are now geared towards putting innocent Nigerians in Jail. When the buffoon that is David Mark shows his silly face in public to call for the imprisonment of LGBT Nigerians, I will not only insult him, I will definitely punch his stupid face if he ever said that in my presence.

When words are lost on idiots, we might need to follow up with action they can understand, in the case of David Mark, punching his ignorant face is all that is needed to slap some sense into him, yeah, that and a brain transplant.

Trackbacks

[…] Nigerian Senate President, Senator David Mark called for the President to urgently sign the bill into Law. ‘The earlier we sign it into law, the better. [Nigeria] have many shortcomings, we don’t want to add this one to it.’ Senator David Mark stated this in his usual pompously ignorant manner. […]